Description
Wesleyan, paperback
Publication Date: March 17, 2000
Publisher Marketing:
New poems from the most iconoclastic poet of his generation.
In the epigraph to Joe Wenderoth’s new volume of poetry, a herdsman, exhorted by Oedipus to speak the truth, replies “It is if I speak that I will be destroyed.”
Wenderoth’s poetry is sparse, nihilistic — and sometimes witty. Publishers Weekly wrote that, “Like Stevens, Wenderoth has a passion for philosophical ideas; at the same time he follows Williams’ dictum: no ideas but in things. The result is poetry that is intellectually charged but whose final fidelity is to the senses.” His new book has the dignity of a sincere and ferocious despair. In the narratives of these poems, “owing is all that really happens,” and lives are shaped by the refusal to “sink dumbly into tolerance of a spectacle.”
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